Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" and Copyright

Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" provided a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement, and the message of his speech continues to resonate with the longstanding issues of race and racism in America.  As a text, the speech and its video footage offer an important example of how CHAT applies to writing in the real world.  However, another issue is the copyrighted nature of the speech, which can limit it's Distribution while also reflecting the economic Ecology of the Civil Rights Movement.

• Transcript of "I Have a Dream" Speech
• Link to "I Have a Dream" Video on YouTube
• NPR Discussion Regarding "I Have a Dream" Copyright

Group Quiz Links

• Quiz Submission Form
• Feedback on Quiz Scoring 

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Menominee Indian Tribe: Creating Genres with Social Purpose

One of the most important aspects of writing is understanding that every writing situation can be approached in multiple ways.  This week, we'll be looking at how the Menominee Indian Tribe in Wisconsin uses online genres such as websites, YouTube, and Facebook in order to spread awareness of tribal customs and improve the financial security of the tribe as a whole.

We'll be using these examples to help understand different approaches we can take in our Project 2 genre examples.

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Genre Analysis Assignment

This assignment is meant to prepare you for the larger Grassroots project by providing practice in writing genre analysis.  Starting with the genre examples you wrote in class and posted on Facebook today, you'll identify a genre convention from within that example and then discuss how that convention is used both in the genre as a whole (e.g. memoir) and in your example (a short example of memoir).

Project 3 - Spring 2012

Fall 2011, Unit 1: Community, Style, and Syntax in Genre Studies

In Unit 1 of Fall 2011, students worked in groups to share "manufactured documents" on their blogs.  Through these blogs, they imagined stories of shark attacks and murder mysteries, September 11th and the Potato Famine, weddings and college admissions.  Their research focused on both the specific events surrounding these situations and the genre conventions used to report these situations.  From police reports to wedding vows, the students revealed a great deal of creativity in revealing just how we learn about the stories we "know."

Examples of Student Work - "How-To" Blog

How to Write About Conventions - Some Examples

Here are some examples to help show how to write about genre conventions.  Their taken from a science fiction course I taught in January 2011.

Unit 2 / Genre Conventions - Visual Projects

Music Videos: Image, Lyrics, and Tone as Visual Literature

Whether you're crafting a documentary or sharing a funny moment from your childhood, photos and videos can significantly affect the audience's experience.  One of the best places to observe this effect is in music video covers, where a single song can be transformed using changes in visual imagery and themes.  In your writing, you can apply these same considerations as you compose the visual scenes within your stories and poems.  By drawing the reader's eye to certain images as opposed to others, you can adjust the way your writing is seen and understood.

Unit 2 / Music Videos - Parody Videos
Intro to Chaos and Narrative
Of Related Interest: Parody and Satire

Conducting Multifaceted Research

As writers, one of our primary tasks is to bring together disparate types of information, analyze them, and then present them to our readers as a coherent (and complete) narrative.  To do this, we first need research our subjects from several different angles.

Multifaceted Research - Sharing Information Online

Shifting Grammar and Syntax to Meet Genre and Cultural Conventions

Today, we're going to examine the role of grammar, style, and syntax in understanding the conventions of genre.  This post complements Haley Stouffer's article "How i Lrnd 2 Txt: An Adventure in Genre."

<--Day 1